Manifesto for Responsible Software Development

That's not a sarcastic question, I genuinely don't know. It seems to be less common than in other engineering disciplines, probably because the harm of misused civil or environmental engineering is so much more blatant. (And perhaps, because so much of professional software - like tracking ad networks - is rather grey morally.)

But I am concerned that right now they're all crying in the wilderness - if two codes are pretty similar, it might be worth burying our disagreements over them until there's some kind of actual conversation or acceptance of any standard at all.

I could even turn this around in a different way, let's assume I decide that I want to help catch bad people. I do this by writing some software that helps deanonymize connections. This can be used to help stop DDOS attacks, track down sex traffickers, etc. So it's intent is good, but it will also be used by Iran, Syria, Russia, China, USA et al. to track down dissidents.

I believe this software should be unethical by these standards, b/c of it's potential misuse/abuse, it was written with good intent! So is that unethical or not?

The reason that I dislike that rule, is that it places the use/abuse on the developer, it's really the operator of the software that is at fault. Right?

This is literally the first thing you read in the very first founding document of the U.S. (the Declaration of Independence): "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights".

And, while a high-level chaotic neutral spellcaster might be great to have in your party, it is quite legitimate for the average village to be terrified of one who's just getting a drink in the tavern.

Yes

I think software engineering has reached this part of professionalism at many places. There, these specific codes of conduct are already in place (DO-178b, IEC 61508, ...).

But software is reaching more and more places and the barriers are lower every day. I believe that we need the discussion about ethics across all layers of professionalism.

This manifesto is of course not enforable. But it is meant as a basis for discussion.

Apart from that I'll gladly try to write down my own thoughts, but that might take a while.

Is the progress you are making accessible somewhere?

I think there is some profound idea lurking where "cache-misses" and convenience are overlapping. We can only keep so much information in our short term memory. The more convenient an interface is the more space is left for information that is strictly important for the task that the user is trying to solve. Also, as humans I believe we use association for populating our "cache". So if we have an intuitive interface it helps us to "pre-cache" information because it will trigger the right associations at the right time. Distractions will trigger the wrong things to be "cached" by association and this will slow us down.

Yet another critical factor is derailment. Or the opposite of being in the zone. If we miss the cache too much we tend to start analyzing ourselves rather than the problem. A second layer of distraction occurs. Or perhaps avoidance behaviors are triggered which further distracts us.